Right, the nation under discussion will never exist. Only a tiny minority would want it to exist.
If it did, however, if tomorrow the South was a sovereign nation though whatever means (secession, expulsion from the Union, alien threat, it doesn’t matter) what would that nation be like in the years ahead?
Well, I assume significant portions of it would be underwater. Beyond that, who knows?
Nitpick: That map is a one year snapshot. I would expect most states to be taking in more and giving back less in 2010 between the stimulus, extended unemployement, and payroll tax cuts. Thisis probably more accurate as it is a twenty year time period (1990-2009).
While that may have been the goal, do you believe that lowering the minimum wage will benefit minorities at the expense of whites?
That would only be true if the vouchers fully paid for the costs of decent private schools. I really don’t see that happening. What will happen is that it will leave the public schools with poor and problem kids that can’t afford or aren’t accepted into private schools and fewer resources to dedicate to them. If the vouchers are big enough you will see a bunch of low cost private schools crop up that will either only take the low cost students, or will be more like child parking warehouses, depending on how well regulated they are. The poor will get worse educations and the rich will get subsidized.
This is why I inwardly cringe a little bit every time I see a “Texas, just leave. Go. Leave. Just go. Go go go.” post. It’s essentially saying “No offense against you personally, but I hate your neighbors political views so much that I wish you were forced to choose between either being stripped of your U.S. citizenship or being forced to move away from your home, job, friends, family, and everything you love and care about. Jeez, just kidding! Lighten up! Ha ha!”
I’m not sure including 1990 data is all that useful, but I’ll cheerfully accept it. The maps are pretty close, especially as compares to the South: Texas is pretty well off, Mississippi and Alabama are disastrously bad, the rest are somewhere in between. Look at your map, though, it looks like it’s Minnesota that has the real beef with the rest of the Union, though.
I forgot to note that such laws were also used to keep women from competing in the labor marketplace as well.
To your point, I believe lowering (better yet, abolishing) the minimum wage would aid the Southern nation as a whole, by reducing unemployment, and with it welfare rolls (and other direct payments), which the South would struggle to pay otherwise. The racial breakdown is harder to figure without extensive study, but off the cuff I don’t think there would be a major difference in the income level of poor whites and poor African-Americans after the reduction/elimination of the minimum wage, as there are plenty of unskilled laborers of all races in the South.
The role of spending in education (beyond a certain minimum level) is severely overstated in our public discourse. It is often discussed as the only meaningful factor, because it’s tangible and easily measured, when it is in fact a relatively minor one. See Gary Burtless’ “Does Money Matter?”, Eric Hanushek’s “The Economics of Schooling”, or this study.
That said, with vouchers enabling private schools to compete for all students, they would have no choice but to become more efficient and effective, as industries subject to competition do. Again, this presupposes a voucher equal to the per-student outlay the school district would have spent, not some token amount. This would lead to improvement in all schooling, though the qualities of educations would still vary, due to those more-important other factors that are beyond the government’s control, and of course individual human variation. On the whole though, you would see improvement, due to free market pressures.
It’s made more galling when you see a proportional electoral map (like this one), instead of the red/blue one. We aren’t so locked into regional differences after all, American politics is a spectrum, it’s not binary.
Agreed, that is why it was a nitpick. You picked California as your example of a liberal net taker and that is not normally true. As a California resident I hope that the norm going forward will be a return to norm as opposed to 2008-2010 being the new norm.
While that may be possible, I suspect that it will instead just mean lower wages for current workers. Added to the lack of health care and lower safety protection, I would expect more poverty overall. But that is just my opinion. Like much of macro economics, experimentation is not possible.
There is a big problem with this supposition. I actually agree that there is an over focus on spending (and on testing and school rating, but that is a different discussion). However, vouchers will not make a free market. The biggest issue is that public schools cannot turn students away and private schools can.
Let’s say that the average cost per student in a public school is $10k per year and that vouchers are exactly that amount. The problem is that is average. A hard working, well behaved child could cost only $5k per year, while a child with developmental or behavioral issues could cost $20k. Even disregarding the fact that cutting school attendance does not lower costs linearly (utilities and other fixed costs don’t come down that way), private schools will only take the students that can earn them a profit. If they can, they will only take the students that earn them the highest profit. So private schools can make a handsome profit on the vouchers without being as efficient as the public schools while public schools cost more and more per student proving that they are inferior. You can see where this ends.
Yes, I should have clarified that. I think current natives of the region will have a good perspective on this question.
Human Action it’s hard to argue that there would be a big difference between the two new countries when your assumption is that the changes the south would make would be positive. If you think that lower taxes and lower wages will be a net win for the south, or that reducing spending on education will have no effect, or that public health won’t suffer when you allow coal fired power plants to operate without scrubbers, or people won’t be crazy enough to ban teaching evolution, or that school boards will not bring back teacher led prayers, then you end up with a new country full of polite people who have good barbecue. But there is very little evidence that any of those assumptions are true, which is basically what the problem is in the south: people who believe in a bunch of crazy shit.
Ok, I understand. I just took the map that was linked to in the BabaBooey thread, I didn’t search for one that showed California in a bad light or anything. Point made, California’s 2009 results were not typical.
[quote-Strassia]
While that may be possible, I suspect that it will instead just mean lower wages for current workers. Added to the lack of health care and lower safety protection, I would expect more poverty overall. But that is just my opinion. Like much of macro economics, experimentation is not possible.
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I disagree with your conclusion, but agree that there’s not really a way to prove it one way or the other. It’s a matter of philosophy, then.
That is a good point (and I agree on the testing, as well). However, without a voucher system, it could be very difficult for a hard-working, well behaved child from a poor family to get a quality education, due to the disruptive influence of the ones with behavior problems, and a lack of incentives for the school to function at its best. Which approach does the most good for the most people, and allows market forces to work more freely? A voucher system, hence my advocacy, though I agree that it is not a perfect system.
And while private schools have the advantage of being able to turn away students, without vouchers, it’s the public schools that have an advantage: not only are they tax-supported, parents must pay taxes for the local schools whether or not their child will attend. This double-payment for those who opt for private schools will, naturally, favor the already advantaged: children of wealthier parents.
Alright then, now I’m on the same page with you.
That’s not my assumption. I have stated that the nation would be poorer than it is now, due in the large part to the end of Federal funding of entitlement programs. I have stated that abortion would almost certainly be heavily restricted or prohibited, which I consider a negative consequence.
I do, at this time our main area of comparative advantage relative to the rest of the nation is low-wage labor. And an end to minimum wage laws would be a net win anywhere.
Up to a certain point, this is true. The third study I cited in post 65 concludes that the state of Massachusetts, in reference to an overpayment on education in the state’s budget…
There is not a significant correlation of dollars spent to academic performance, beyond a baseline level. More money spent does not automatically lead to better schools. You don’t have to believe this, but it’s not a case of “believing in crazy shit.”
Do you have evidence for your assumptions? I provided some back in post 65.
That’s pretty offensive, but you are entitled to your beliefs, as are the people you insult. If you’ve said your piece here, I’d like to say thanks for conducting civil discourse (that last remark excepted). If you wish to further debate our respective assumptions, that’s fine too.
Surely you meant to say “the issuing of the license was completed without FURTHER incident,” no? The fact of an initial refusal is incident enough.
You guys seem to be assuming that the states that would secede would form one Southern nation. During the Civil War Confederacy, several of the Confederate states were miffed about being under the thumb of even the Confederacy and were making noises about being independent from the Confederacy. If the Confederacy had managed to last longer than it did, several states probably would have withdrawn and gone their own way, or tried to. I’ll bet that a similar thing would happen here, though it probably wouldn’t make sense for some states to go completely their own way (Texas might be able to manage it since they did before).
It helps the initial understanding to compare protest turnouts, maybe, but I can’t help but be dissatisfied at our methodology. Let’s try a polling question: Gallup has been asking people, “Do you approve of interracial marriage?”, for fifty years. In 2011 the South lagged ten points behind the rest of the country on that - 79% in the South vs. ~90% elsewhere.
That could be one of a constellation of data points used to illustrate that the South still has a lot of catching up to do, but almost everybody already knows that, so I’m not intending to draw up that argument. I just felt we could use some meaningful numbers when we compared ignorance in Tennessee to ignorance in New York.
No comment other than to note that strict voter ID laws have already been enacted or are pending Voting Rights Act approval in most southern states, many in the last couple of years.
It might be a result of who I associate with, but I hear a bit of complaining about short maternity leaves. The whole “Republicans only care about life until birth” thing is a caricature and what I’m trying to say is maternity leave seems to be an untapped resource for “family values” politicians - it meets all the lip service/rhetoric requirements, it’s actually good for families, and it doesn’t involve any pesky obvious transfers or redistribution.
What does it take to be a theocracy? Most of the things people have pointed out in this thread (abortion, gay marriage, religious schools, ten commandments, prayer in schools, … ) are issues because of theological beliefs. If 75% of voters ratify an amendment because they believe God wants them to, isn’t that a form of legal rule via religion? If the new Country legally enshrines public Christian prayer, displays, and benefits to churches, isn’t that a little theocratic?
As long as we’re on the subject, AR, TN, MS, TX, SC, and NC forbid atheists from holding public office per their state constitutions. Under the current regime this is obviously federal-unconstitutional but if a new SCOTSEC was drawn out of appointees from the Deep South to judge based on a newly drafted Southern Constitution, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if these bans were reenacted in our new hypothetical nation.
“A reputation born of events long past” is a very lenient judgment. We continue to earn our keep with incidents like the JP in Louisiana, the church in MS that wouldn’t host a black wedding, the segregated proms, the slavery apologist state rep in Arkansas…the verifiable fact that the South easily outpaces the rest of the nation in racist views…and the nincompoops we keep voting into national office.
You’re right about parts of Southern culture being awesome but you seem like you’re only very dimly aware of how bad it really is down here, or else you want to ignore it. I think (if you chop the 5% most extreme haters, like the genocide guy) the South has gotten a pretty fair shake in this thread. Do you?
I think this hits the nail on the head. Every state has ignorant yahoos, you just want to keep it below 50%.
I will clarify, using the linked CNN article.
So, it wasn’t the case that the couple were refused their marriage license. They were issued a license by the court clerk, and the first justice of the peace they contacted to perform a ceremony and sign the license refused. The couple went to a different justice, and Bardwell, who’d refused them, resigned. It is thus inaccurate to say that Bardwell “refused to issue a license,” as that power is held by the court clerk, not the justice of the peace. Call me a stickler, but I just wanted to be accurate, and point out that the refusal to sign reflects the racism of a single man, not systemic racism by the parish.
That’s almost exactly the figure I’d have guessed (I’d have gone with 85%, off the cuff). Not to sound callous, but we have to wait for some people to die for that figure to improve. And a 10% gap isn’t all that much, actually, I’d have expected the non-South figure to be higher than that.
Ah. I’ve never been, but I’m sure it’s lovely.
True enough, but per Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, the effects of such laws on minority voting turnout has been inconclusive. In contrast, pre-Voting Rights Act tactics at disenfranchisment left no doubts as to their efficacy.
Interesting. I’m sure the Republicans would like more of the female vote, maybe this is something they’ll add to their platform.
Mirriam-Webster’s definition is “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” So, rule by priests. Legislating morality that is reinforced by interpretation of religon is a step removed, I don’t think it qualifies. And I don’t think state benefits to churches would happen.
Perhaps, but I’m not sure the impulse to do so would be all that strong, since an open atheist would struggle to win the election in the first place.
That’s the cruel truth, that the South is judged as a whole by the actions of a small number of cranks and radicals, and actions of 40 years ago, because it feeds into people’s prejudices about the region. Redeeming our reputation is going to be a long, difficult struggle, but time is on our side, as the hardcore racists are dying off. And there are some fine Southern politicians, such as my own state’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell. I’ll take him over Maxine Waters or Barbara Boxer any day, but that’s just a personal aside.
I think we just disagree on “how bad it really is”. Perhaps Southern Arkansas is substantially worse than my area, or other Southern locales where I’ve spent time (Florida and Alabama).
I would agree that the South has gotten a fair shake. My summary of my position would be: “The South: We’re Not That Bad, And We’re Getting Better.” Going forward, while other states will be in the vanguard for marriage equality and other important issues, the South can keep up the fight for Second Amendment rights, limited government, and the right to work. Between the 50 states, we might just end up with a better nation.
This may be a function of higher voter turnout among the elderly, who would be more likely to hold certain backward ideas. We can wait them out, though.
Inconclusive due to lack of data. We’ve only had a couple states and a couple elections to go by. Anyway, if you would like to follow my reasoning:
A nation where the voters enact laws because their preachers told them to vote that way is only barely preferable to a nation where the preachers can eliminate the middleman and govern by themselves. If you’ll humor a sliding scale of theocracy, the USSEC would take a big lurch in that direction, even if we don’t follow the Webster’s definition to the letter.
These Constitutions were written in the 1800s when the struggle for an open atheist would have been far greater, yet they chose to include the provisions anyway.
How many cranks and radicals, and actions of the most recent 5 years, would it take to get you to change your tune?
So the South will have limited government, huh? No taxpayer dollars spent on trying to enforce laws about when and where one can be gay, black or atheist, huh?
Good luck with that.